“Mitt,” Al Gore, and Our Identification With Presidential Losers

Friends of McCain’s say that his loss in ’08, and the ridicule he suffered in the wake of it, was traumatizing in itself. “John has had two defining events in his life,” Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, told me. “The first was his imprisonment, and the second was his failure to win the presidency.”

McCain was held in a North Vietnamese prison camp for more than five and a half years, undergoing torture and solitary confinement. Coburn is not equating that experience with an election loss—the pain and anguish of politics being less than that of war—but it does seem possible that crushing imprisonment and a very public defeat could be traumatic in similar ways. How would it feel to hold yourself up before every citizen and be repudiated or passed over by a healthy majority of them? There may be no starker referendum on an individual’s character and professional fitness in America than a Presidential election.

“I have looked, by the way, at what happens to anybody in this country who loses as the nominee of their party. They become a loser for life, all right? That’s it. It’s over.”

This is Mitt Romney, speaking at a fund-raiser in a scene from the new documentary “Mitt,” directed by Greg Whiteley, which began streaming Friday afternoon, on Netflix. Whiteley followed Romney, his family, and his advisers over the course of six years, spanning two failed Presidential campaigns. As he speaks, Romney puts his hand to his head, the thumb and index finger forming the letter L. (Then, just to remind you that this is Romney, his ad lib turns oddly mean, as he notes that “Mike Dukakis can’t get a job mowing lawns.”) Romney said plenty of odd things during the campaign, and here he drifts into hyperbole. Yet, notice the implication—that losing the office equates to a kind of death, one that is not just political. The pain may be intertwined with the level of ego necessary for a person even to consider running for President. All the same, we recognize some truth in his verdict, mostly because Romney himself seems to believe it. He is, essentially, foreshadowing his own future.

Manyreviews of “Mitt” have noted its humanizing effect on Romney: he is revealed to be thoughtful and gracious and, in scenes with his family, funny and self-aware. There are even murmurings that such a portrait, had it been released before the election, would have helped him to shed his reputation as an ambitious automaton and to forge a closer connection to voters. Maybe he would have won. But, in the heat of a campaign, the documentary would have been greeted differently, as a purely political object—mined for ready clues to his political positions, spun predictably by supporters and detractors. What did the fact that he listened to “This American Life” or quoted “O Brother Where Art Thou?” or attempted to iron his clothes while wearing them say about his ability to be the President? Surely his handlers wouldn’t have wanted anyone hearing him call himself “the flipping Mormon” or noting, rather bitterly, that he may have been a “flawed candidate.” But there is not much utility in a retrospective gaffe; seen now, the documentary is more intriguing for its general tone, which is one of pathos and quiet regret.

In this way, “Mitt” is a spiritual cousin to a little-seen documentary about another failed Presidential candidate. In 2000, the director Spike Jonze, at the request of Al Gore’s campaign, made a thirteen-minute video about the candidate, intimately and informally shot, with a jumpy hand-held camera, when Gore was at his home in Tennessee and on vacation with his family. It was shown at the Democratic National Convention that summer, but not in prime time. It is partly a traditional campaign video: Gore talks about improving manufacturing and schools and speaks about the empathy he feels for Americans struggling to improve their lives. But, mostly, it is about Gore’s personality. The candidate appears, wearing a green polo shirt and a pair of loose-fitting jeans. Jonze joins him and his daughter in a limousine. Among Gore’s first words onscreen: “Do you know what these are?” he asks, pointing at a canvas bag. “Gas masks.” He laughs and notes that he is forced to travel everywhere with them.

It is an odd and funny collection of scenes. Gore goes to visit his mother. He says grace. He and his family debate which movies they should watch that night. Gore leads a minor seminar on the merits of their various choices—a near parody of his public persona. At one point, Gore shows Jonze some of the objects on his walls. There is a photo of him dressed as a convincing version of Frankenstein’s monster for Halloween. He shows a framed list of pros and cons that his daughter had written down when Gore was considering running for President the first time, in 1988. Pros: “Wants to do it. Good chance.” Cons: “Would not be here a lot. Would not like to have Social Security around all the time.” He grins at the malapropism. (In “Mitt,” Romney’s family has similar discussions, weighing the merits of running and expressing ambivalence about campaigning and even about the prospect of winning: one of Romney’s daughters-in-law, Jen, points out that the worst thing about running for President is that you might actually have to be the President. “Who’d want to do that?”)

Despite its freewheeling sensibility, the Jonze video is structured around a central premise, which is that Gore has been pegged as aloof and has struggled to connect with voters. “I’m a little more reserved than a lot of people I know in politics,” he says. “But trying to break through that, that’s probably the most frustrating thing.” Gore and his wife at the time, Tipper, describe how they first met, back when they were teen-agers:

“I was smitten. It was love at first sight,” he says. “He was handsome, and had a serious look about him, and also he was considerate and would ask me questions about myself.” “Was I a little stiff?” “You weren’t stiff at all.”

They kiss, and then Tipper adds, “And, you know, you’re not now.”

This was all an attempt, too late in the campaign, to counter the image of Gore as a robotic wonk, in contrast to Bush, the affable everyman. Seen later, it takes on a different character. Al and Tipper Gore are divorced. The George W. Bush Administration played out like a bad dream. The scenes in which Gore talks about his early antipathy toward politics, and the shadow his senator father cast over his life, take on greater resonance, offering keys to understanding why he lost. (Romney shares his own self-doubts in “Mitt.” In an early scene, in 2006, Tagg Romney mentions his grandfather George’s advice about entering politics: “Don’t do it.”) The hope that we see in the Gore family’s eyes as it weathers the final months of a Presidential campaign becomes almost tragic.

The emotional power of both the Jonze footage and Whiteley’s documentary comes from knowing what the figures onscreen don’t, which is that all the effort and personal exposure will end in failure. They more easily win our sympathy, along with a new kind of attention. One of the paradoxes of Presidential campaigns is that candidates can become more fascinating after they lose than when they were still in the running. In an odd way, we can imagine more what it would feel like to be the President than we can the Presidential runner-up. We’ve seen the television shows and the movies. We know what the Oval Office looks like, even if we’ve never been there. More important, we see the President every day, doing the familiar things required of the office. The greater mystery, and so the greater narrative drama, lies in the afterlife of the losers.

Some recent losers have simply returned to their other political duties, as when John Kerry and McCain went on being senators. They’re not the ones we want to see. We are eager, at least for a while, for a glimpse of those who wake up on the day after the election with nothing to do. We stare at images of them: of Gore, after 2000, having gained weight and grown a beard; Romney, in the days after the election, filling his car with gas or gleefully riding on a minor roller coaster at Disneyland. (This month, he was seen attempting the “Gangnam Style” dance at a conference for young Mormons.) We may even worry about these Presidential losers and feel a newfound protectiveness. Having rejected them as political candidates, we owe them a final square appraisal as people.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.